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lundi 14 septembre 2015

THE DRAMATIC BLINDNESS OF WESTERN ORTHODOX THEOLOGIANS TOWARDS RUSSIA

The
open letter published by three American Orthodox Christians on September 3,
2015,[1]
reproaching the very respected American Catholic professor George Weigel for
“having insulted the Russian Church”, is symptomatic of the increasing malaise
within the Orthodox Church both in Russia and among some of its representatives
in the Western world. George Weigel did nothing more than denounce Russian
aggression in Crimea, following the lead of almost the totality of the
countries belonging to the United Nations with the exception of ten countries,
and defend the Greek Catholic Church against the systematic and unfounded
accusations of the Patriarchate of Moscow.[2]
Two Orthodox priests and a lay person who felt wounded by the truthful words of
the Catholic theologian chose to publish an argumentative letter stating the
reasons why they continue to support Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. But they write
this letter knowing that, above and beyond the brilliant analyses of G. Weigel[3],
the whole world is now witnessing the astonishing moral collapse of the
Patriarchate of Moscow and the end of the myth of the new Russian Church in
which so many sincere people wanted to believe in after 1991.[4]Anyone
today, Christian or not, understands that a Christian Church which blesses an
offensive war and promotes the annexation of a neighboring State, is in
profound contradiction with its Founder’s message of peace.[5]
This is why I don’t think that the publication of the open letter to Professor
Weigel should be considered as an act of propaganda. The famous photos of
Patriarch Kirill blessing a military arms factory in Siberia or the Bishop of
Volgodonsk blessing the Russian bombers on the Ukrainian border were certainly
known by the authors of this letter.[6]

I
would rather interpret this letter as a call for help.[7]
Their underlying, non-formulated, painful (and hence polemical) questions are
the following: how is it that the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church of St.
Vladimir, of St. Seraphim of Sarov, is so sick? Can the Holy Orthodox Church be
deceiving itself? Would it be rather the Western world which is upside-down?
But why are all these reports in the Western media about the Crusade ideology
of the “Russian world” of Patriarch Kirill so painful to hear? And what to make
of the declarations of the Russian government accusing the American
administration of being responsible for the change of government in Kiev when
everyone knows, at least in the United States, that Ukraine is far from being a
geo-strategic priority of the White House and that the European Union does not
have any commercial interest in privileging Ukraine over Russia?

The
letter thus poses three profound questions which should be taken seriously; one
is theological-political, the other is historical and the last concerns the
media.

1)The
theological-political question

How
is it, our three authors ask, that our Church, which since the 4th
century, has based its political theology on a symphonic relationship between
the State and the Church, now finds itself in such a dramatic situation? There
is no lack of information concerning the state of dereliction of the Orthodox
Church in Russia. One need only watch the film Leviathan, directed by Zviaguintsev, to be convinced of this. In
the film, the director shows that the sharing of power between the governor of
a region and the local bishop, based on the so-called “separation” between the
Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar, is balanced in an “orthodox” manner
through the so-called “symphony” between the temporal and spiritual powers.
This symphony leads, in reality, to giving the governor a free hand to
administer the affairs of his regions in the most dishonorable way imaginable
while the bishop receives all sorts of privileges and material advantages in
exchange for his silence.[8]

Our
authors indirectly raise the following question: Is it possible that the
Eastern Fathers were mistaken when they used symphony to describe the ideal
model of Church-State relations? They add another question just as fundamental
as this first one: Is it possible that Western Christians feel at ease with the
model of secularization which has predominated in the United States for the
last two centuries? Two simple questions which, unfortunately, cannot be
answered in a few lines. We will limit ourselves to recommend to our authors
that they read Orthodox writers such as George Fedotov or Father Alexander Schmemann.[9]
These authors have taken note of the fact that Caesaro-Papism fell apart in
1917. They were able to come to this awareness because, for them, the Church is
a divine-human Body, composed of history and eternity and thus dynamic.
According to Alexander Schmemann, if the symphonic model of Theodosius and then
Justinian represented a progress when compared to the period of persecutions, it cannot be eternally baptized as Christian. In fact, the
Church was manipulated by the emperors very soon. The Church tends toward the
Kingdom of God upon earth. It cannot limit itself to strict separation between
the temporal and the spiritual, but it also cannot accept to transform what
constitutes the corporality of Christ on earth into an instrument of propaganda
for a State which subjugates its fellow citizens – be this a Tsarist State or a
Bolshevist State.

It
is not because the Western democracies, which formerly separated the saeculum from the divine power in such a
radical way that they are now losing their spiritual energies,[10]
that it is necessary to relapse into the monophysite heresy which consists in
seeing a single divine nature in Christ. What must be done is to delve deeper
into the social doctrine of the Orthodox Church (which, in the year 2000,
recognized, for the first time, the primacy of conscience over the laws of the
State), reflecting in an antinomic and eschatological perspective, on a model
of relationship between Church and State which is no longer symphonic (because
this symphony never really worked and, moreover, led to the subjection of the
Church) but “analogical”. The Church is, in fact, according to the Orthodox
liturgical tradition, the Burning Bush, the Spouse of the Lamb. In the
primitive Christian tradition, the model of the nuptial relationship between
Christ and the Church should be the basis for social life on all its levels from
the family level even up to the level of international law, passing through the
Nation-State. The Church should give priority to its liberty to love and to
hasten the Kingdom. But the kingdom of God on earth, - which is the Christian political
project par excellence since Christ taught it to his disciples in the “Our
Father” -, will only be able to be realized with a reconciled Christianity
capable of demonstrating the possible syntheses among the regulative charism of
Peter, the liberty of James and the mystical vision of John. This has been
vigorously affirmed by the greatest Russian Orthodox minds, from Vladimir
Solovyov to Sergius Bulgakov.

2)The
historical question

The
second question posed by our authors is historical. To sum up their position we
could say that they defend the mythological narrative of the “Russian world”
which has been propagated for many years by Patriarch Kirill due to the sole
fact that the contemporary Russian State received its Orthodox faith - and
hence its moral foundation – through a chain of personalities which go back to
the baptism of Vladimir at Chersonesus in Crimea. Using this narrative, they
cannot qualify Russian aggression in Crimea as a real war since, in their mind,
Crimea is “russyn” soil, and-hence-Russian, while Ukraine is only a “border
country” which really doesn’t have any identity. Moreover, they support the
project of the Russian Church of a “new evangelization of the historic lands of
the Rus’ of Kiev”.

In
a recent book, I demonstrated that this approach was mythical – in the sense
that it based the continuous identity of the nation on a collective myth – the
baptism of Vladimir. This myth was able to be the foundation for the
consciousness of a nation but it did not take the evolution of memories into
account and hence, after a certain time, the possible ruptures within the
history of nations. We must, therefore, separate the true from the false in
collective memories in order to arrive at an authentic mytho-logical narrative,
which does not deny the power of transcendence in a nation’s identity but which
also does not deny the workings of the Spirit in the transformation of a people
into several nations. France, Italy and Germany, for example, are all heirs of
the same holy Carolingian Empire and their history is founded on this heritage.
But, indisputably, and without their being able to account for it easily, three
distinct nations were progressively formed between the 14th and 20th
centuries on the basis of three distinct interpretations of this imperial
heritage.

To
sum up my thesis in a few lines, the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian nations
were formed during modern times (14th – 18th centuries)
after the Tatar-Mongol and Lithuanian-Polish invasions of the 13th
and 14th centuries had cut their territories into three. Each one of
these nations kept the memory of their relationship with the Rus’ of Kiev and
hence of their belonging to the great European family of Christianized peoples;
but the collective memories of the three peoples interpreted the nature of
their origins and respective missions in a different way.

Everyone
knows that the very notion of a “Russian State” only appears in the 17th
century under Peter the Great as an attempt to revive a Muscovite identity
which had become tyrannical and corrupt. Prior to that there was only Muskovy.
Similarly, Ukraine does not emerge as a real nation until the 17th
century with the arrival of the Cossack chivalry in the south of Rus’ which was
hostile to the Polish conquest. The clearest example of this divergent
interpretation of the same baptismal foundation of the two nations can be found
in the contradictory receptions of the Council of Florence at Moscow and Kiev
in the 1440s. As the Russian historian Basil Lourie has shown, during the years
1439-1448, Vassili II, the Great Prince of Moscow, thought that the priority of
the Church of Moscow, if it were to remain faithful to its baptism, was to
become autocephalous, independent of Byzantium.[11] In
March 1441, the Great Prince stripped Isidore, his delegate to the Council of
Florence, of his title of metropolitan after the latter signed the treaty of
union with the Church of Rome along with almost all the Orthodox bishops of the
epoch. In 1511, the monk Philotheus of Pskov, deducing the consequences of the
fall of Constantinople in 1453, intensified the isolation of the Muscovite
Church by proposing to Prince Vassili III the project of “Moscow, the Third
Rome”.

Conversely,
as the Ukrainian historian Mykola Tchubaty points out, the Orthodox Churches of
Kiev and Smolensk reacted differently. In December 1440-February 1441, these
Churches gave a triumphal reception to Metropolitan Isidore upon his return
from Florence.[12]
For them, fidelity to the baptism of Vladimir signified, above all, belonging
to the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius; unity to the Church in the Creed of Nicea-Constantinople was more
fundamental than the certainly important question of ecclesial autocephaly.

Later
on, (and even to this day - with a few exceptions such as Sergius Bulgakov and
Olivier Clement) the Russian Orthodox Church has sought to devaluate the
Council of Florence by claiming that it was not an authentic ecumenical
council. According to the book by Joseph Gill on the Council of Florence, such
an evaluation can no longer be accepted by any serious historian.[13]All
the historical accounts show that, in fact, there was a profound and serious
consensus of nearly all the theologians of the East and of the West at Florence
and this would predominate in the lands of the Rus’ of Kiev until at least
1596. The result of this blindness of Russia was that the Greek Catholic
Churches in Slavic lands, which are the heirs of the Orthodox Churches
reconciled with Rome, were brutally dissolved by Tsar Nicolas I in Belarus in
1839, and in Ukraine by Stalin in 1946. But the stunning rebirth of these
Churches since the collapse of Communism in 1991, testifies to the profound and
persistent truth of a contra-model to the project of “Moscow Third Rome” - the sapiential model of a Church called to
reflect not only the personal unity of God but also the conciliarity of the
intra-Trinitarian life. In such a model, which I would define as “catholic-orthodox”
(following the lead of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla of Kiev and Metropolitan
Philaret Drozdov of Moscow) the local Church cannot be based on the proud
project of a “Holy Russia” understood, according to the epochs as a “deus ex machina”
or as “the Third International”. The local Church can only flourish according
to a dynamic and theanthropic process of love and recognition among local
Churches.

Ukraine
has its own proper identity and it is urgent that the Russian Orthodox
theologians become aware of this as did the late professor Georges Fedotov.[14] At
the risk of proposing a contra-testimony to the truth of ecclesial orthodoxy:
the pan-Orthodox Council scheduled for June 2016 will not be able to ignore the
reality of the local Church and, hence, of the autocephaly of the Orthodox
Church of Ukraine. This is being discussed more and more clearly today since
the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew insists on the ecumenical priority of the
Church of Christ. Moreover, the Church of Constantinople is the Mother Church
of Orthodoxy in Ukraine and has never recognized the historical usurpation of
the See of Kiev by Moscow.

3)The
question of the media

The
third theme which our authors treat in a polemic way – which only manifests
their confusion in the face of a highly contradictory reality – is that which I
will summarily call “the media”. It is a question of finding the correct
interpretation of the events in Ukraine since 1991 and, especially, since
November 2013, amidst the contemporary nebulous media coverage. Our authors
evoke a number of “facts” which they think reveal that the medias throughout
the world (with the obvious exception of the Russian media) are wrong in
presenting the Ukrainian revolution of February 2014 as a “revolution of
dignity” and the Russian-Ukraine War as the consequence of the annexation of
Crimea by Russia on March 18, 2014.

The
authors embrace the clichés of Russian propaganda which depict the Ukrainian
people as Fascists who collaborated with Hitler during the Second World War and
claim, without proofs, that the May 2, 2014 massacre of Odessa was carried out
by the Ukrainian authorities who took over after the revolution of Maidan; they
treat Russian aggression in Ukraine as “mythical” etc… The enumeration of such
“facts” should still be taken very seriously here for it manifests a desire –
noble in itself but irrational – of a mythical truth and, consequently of a
transcendent and eternal truth.

Other
“facts’, these real and well documented, are not lacking concerning the Russian
forces in Crimea on the occasion of the pseudo-referendum on the peninsula in
March 2014 or concerning the participation of the Russian Church in Russia’s
invasion of Crimea and Donbass. Vladimir Putin, moreover, has admitted himself in
2015 that he had been personally planning the invasion of Crimea since February
20, 2014. There is also the video showing Colonel Igor Girkin accompanying
Patriarch Kirill in Crimea in January of 2014. And there are numerous witnesses
to the support given by the bishops of the patriarchate of Moscow to the
Orthodox Army of Donbass – to the point that Patriarch Kirill and Metropolitan
Hilarion Alfeyev are now forbidden residency in Ukraine. In May 2014, I
dedicated a whole book to this theme denouncing the lies of Kremlin propaganda.[15] I
invite our authors to read my book which has been translated into English and
is accessible on the internet.[16]

It
is true that in certain cases it is not always easy to find the truth among so
much propaganda. Each year, the Kremlin spends more than $300 million on a
single deformation channel, Russia Today. This is why I understand the troubles
of sincere friends of Russia and the Orthodox Church. The media are full of
half-truths which are very difficult to contradict. But, just taking the
example of the massacre of Odessa on May 2 2014 – an attentive study of the
report of the United Nations, of the European Council and of the Open Dialogue
Foundation[17]
or even the detailed account of the encyclopedia Wikipedia show that the
massacre of Odessa could not have been planned by the new Ukrainian authorities
who came into power in February 2014.[18] The
police of Odessa, who were guilty of not intervening to separate the
protagonists, had been put into place by the preceding pro-Russian government
of V. Yanukovych. On the other hand, it is very probable, as shown on a report
filmed by Ukraine Today[19],
that the 200 seriously wounded and 48 persons who perished following the arson
of the Trade Union House, were victims of a terrorist act planned by
pro-Russian mercenaries and by Russian citizens. These Russians were
subsequently arrested and quickly released by the local police with the
complicity of the chief of the pro-Russian militia of Odessa who is currently a
fugitive.

We must not fall into relativism, skepticism
or Manicheism in face of the complexity of truth. Truth is one. Even though it
might not be convincing, even though it demands the effort of adhesion on the
part of each person, it is all-powerful. But it is necessary that the logos, the historical truth, the
critical approach, balance the muthos, the
moral truth, the memorial approach. Thus, for example, it is very true that the
Western Ukrainians massively sided with the armies of Hitler in 1941-42. But
this was because the Soviet occupation was extremely violent against them in
1939- 1941. As Timothy Snyder has shown in a detailed study, it was these same
Ukrainians who fought the most in Europe against two totalitarianisms between
1942 and 1945 and who had the most victims from the Nazi and Communist regimes.
It is often forgotten that the Ukrainians were the first to liberate the
prisoners from the extermination camps of Auschwitz Birkenau.

This
is the reason why I am glad that the Ukrainian Parliament, following the lead
of other Central European countries, voted to condemn the totalitarian regimes
of Communism and Nazism in May, 2015.[20] It
is by laying down moral foundations that a nation can come together, heal the
wounds of the past, construct a lawful State and project itself into the
future. This is what West Germany did after 1945 by a very clear-cut criticism
of Nazi ideology, by a sincere repentance and by a subsequent purge of all
traces of Nazism in its state, economic, moral and intellectual structures.

In
this respect, it is a shame that the Russian State, far from condemning its
Communist past, now only thinks of rehabilitating it, as can be seen by the new
history textbooks being used in Russian schools. The same could be said of the
Russian Church which has not drawn on the consequences of its condemnation, at
the beginning of the 1990s, of the regime of collaboration with the Soviet
authorities since 1927. All the contrary, while Russia was invading Ukraine,
Patriarch Kirill was passing out honorific awards to the principle
propagandists of the neo-Soviet regime of President Putin (Gennady Zyuganov and
Dmitry Kiselev). His right hand man, Father Vsevolod Chaplin, who is in charge
of the relations between Church and society in Russia, keeps mouthing nostalgic
declarations about the Soviet past as if V. Chalamov, M. Heller, E. Ginzbourg, S.
Alexievich, A. Solzhenitsyn had never written anything on the mechanisms of
Soviet totalitarianism. In spite of the overwhelming testimonies concerning the
pressure Stalin exercised on Patriarch Alexis in 1945 to eliminate the Greek
Catholic Church[21],
the Russian Church, including its most gifted representatives such as
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, still continues to deny its implication in the
forced incorporation of this Church into the pseudo-synod of Lviv in March
1946. The irresponsibility of this attitude is measured by the wave of
anti-clericalism which is now surging in Russia. Less than 1% of the population
of Moscow assists at the great feasts of the Church.

This
capability of lying by throwing one’s self into the arms of Russian propaganda
would be impossible if the “heart-intellect” of these defenders of Russian
Orthodoxy underwent an in-depth purification. This is the reason why those who
are really responsible for the success of Russian propaganda are not found in
those who work in the trolling factories which, from Russia, fill the world
with counter-truths, but in the vision of the world which lurks deep down
within us. It is very clear for me that the secularized philosophy which runs
throughout most of the Western media is not the cure-all. But it has its merits
when compared to the philosophy of the neo-Soviet media in that it defends the
liberty of opinion of each one – be it pro-Russian, pro-Ukrainian, homosexual
or heterosexual. The media lynching of Russian citizens hostile to the war in
Ukraine, who are systematically treated as members of a fifth column or foreign
agents, who are constantly threatened physically or in courts which are under
the heel of the State, is extremely serious. It led to the assassination of
Boris Nemtsov on February 28, 2015.

Conclusion

I would like recommend, with infinite respect and humility, that
the friends of the Russian Orthodox Church begin by recognizing the evidence:
the Russian Church is going through a profound crisis. It is useless to seek
out scape-goats and still less among the sincere friends of Orthodoxy as Professor
George Weigel who are saddened by the crisis it is living. It would be more
constructive to listen to the Russian Orthodox professor Andrei Zubov who was
dismissed from his teaching post at MGIMO, the famous Institute of Political
Studies in Moscow, because of his public denunciation of the annexation of
Crimea. Zubov considers that the Russian Church, since it lost its liberty
under Peter the Great and subsequently was forced to accept the most iniquitous
decisions of the Tsarist regime, then, (after a brief period of reestablishment
between 1917-1921) those of the Soviet regime, shoulders a great part of the
responsibility of the profound crisis which the Russian nation is undergoing at
present.

This
crisis, as I have explained elsewhere,[22]
now also affects, on a larger scale, the whole Orthodox Church after centuries
of anti-modern crisis. But the good news is that this crisis is not hopeless.
As Father Alexander Men once said “Christianity is only beginning”. It would be
enough if some representatives of the Orthodox Church, worthy of this name,
accept to recognize past faults, sincerely repent of them and rediscover the
semantic polyphony of the very concept of orthodoxy (it is the rudder of
faith-truth) for the horizon of reciprocal esteem among Christians to open
again. All would then be able to work in depth at the renewal traced out by the
emigrant Orthodox Church (and especially by the great figures of the Christian
orthodox Schools of Paris and St. Vladimir’s in the US) – a renewal which
includes inter-Orthodox and Ecumenical reconciliation. Rising above all the
sterile polemics, all would then be able to consecrate themselves, Russians and
non-Russians, to the unique worthy goal: the construction on earth of a just,
peaceful, fraternal and hospitable society.

[2] In particular, there was the stupor of the Catholic bishops united
in a synod on the family in October of last year who had the kindness to invite
the Orthodox Metropolitan Hilarion Alleyev, in a gesture designed to promote
ecumenical relations, when the patriarch responded with mendacious accusations
directed at the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. This attitude was at the
origin of the response from George Weigel.

[5] The discussions on the internet opposing the modesty of the life
style of Pope Francis and the personal fortune of Patriarch Kirill are equally
well-known (the affair of the patriarch’s apartment on Naberejna in Moscow
etc…)

[7] Without pretending to give lessons to anyone, it happens that I
lived many years in Russia, Ukraine and in the West. I simply want to share the
fruit of the experience I acquired through my studies and practical field work.

[8]To know more on the crisis of the Patriarchate of Moscow, there are
the chronicles of Deacon Kurayev on the lobbying power of the homosexual
bishops and the repeated scandals of pedophilia….